The present politically negative stand of Pasok to the Samaras government introduction of the payment of twenty-five euros for medical treatment in public hospitals for those who can afford to pay it, is utterly unwise and politically reprehensible and condemnable as it could destabilize the coalition government of New Democracy and Pasok. The latter must realize that its political fortune and éclat is tied up solely with the success of the Samaras government in pulling the country out of the crisis and by putting it on the trajectory of economic development and hence to the gradual reduction of unemployment, and not on any ephemeral gains, on the polls. In the event which is most unlikely that the electorate will not render to Pasok the justified plaudits for the economic success of the government, history will pass the ultimate judgment and write in golden letters the prudent participation of Pasok in the formation of the Samaras government as its ultimate contribution toward saving Greece from economic and political catastrophe.

This stupendous success of the Coalition Government will erase all other parties, from Syriza to the Golden Dawn, from the electoral map and will be their Nemesis for their sinister and perfidious populist policies that shamelessly deceived a sizeable part of the people by their totally false promises and completely screwball inapplicable policies. Only New Democracy and Pasok will reap the fruits of this tremendous success that had prevented Greece from falling into the abyss of disaster. It is for this reason that Pasok must immediately cease its adverse stand toward the twenty-five euro payment whose raison d’etre is the restructuring of the medical system so it can render better services to its more indigent patients.

Serious economic analysts both within and outside Greece are forecasting that the country by the end of 2014 will be out of the economic crisis as a result of the painful but necessary austerity measures that the Samaras government had taken, by reducing the public sector that impeded economic growth, by privatizing public corporations, and by making the economy more competitive and entrepreneurial. Hence the prudent policies of the Samaras government would draw foreign investment into the country that in turn would lead to the resurgence of the economy and for the first time in six years 2014 would show, according to economic predictions, a fiscal surplus and a small growth of 0.5 in Gross Domestic Product.

Needless to say political stability is a prerequisite for starting a spree of investment. Pasok by foolishly shaking this stability for electoral interests apparently seems to be unaware that by doing so it hinders and discourages indigenous and international entrepreneurs from making any investments that are so vital for the economic recovery of the country.

It is this great achievement of the government in pulling Greece out of the crisis that Pasok in an unprecedented conduct of political frivolity could jeopardize by refusing to pay a twenty-five euro fee for treatment in a public hospital, which could bring about the collapse of the Samaras government.

To associate the skeptics of climate change with the repudiators of the link between AIDS and the HIV virus and with the conspiracy theories of 9/11 and the “Larouche delusions,” shows clearly that professor Clive Hamilton rests his case on an intellectually very weak reed. Further, to presume, as he does, that all skeptics are deliberate “denialists”and “contrarians” lacking scientific arguments and considering them to be “irreverent” to the scientific evidence presented by the supporters of climate change, like him, is to put the hood of the Inquisitor on his head. The Spanish Inquisition is alive and well in the censorious strictures of professor Hamilton.

To conflate, as Yusuf does, the so called cultural ‘warriors’ of the West with the religiously fanatic suicidal jihadists of al Qaeda, does not only abuse reality but also one’s intellectual integrity and honesty. Yusuf writes “the vast majority of people …are quite happy to live with people who don’t share their culture or religion”. Indeed they do, but only in the tolerant societies of the West. However, that does not mean that they are indifferent or apathetic about the achievements of their own culture. No people can survive without breathing daily the achievements of their own culture. And no people can be proud of these achievements if they are depicted by revisionist historians that they have been made by the “spilling of blood”.

In our case, Australia’s culture is the descendant of the great culture of Western civilization. But no culture, no matter how great, is a manifestation of Godly purity. However, the blemishes of Western culture are infinitesimal next to its “infinite” virtues, and hence Western culture is ”closer” to the “realm of God”.

Yusuf wrote his piece on On Line…under the rubric of political philosophy. But with his moral equation between the “loud-mouthed cultural ‘warriors’ and the likes of al Qaida,” he bans himself from all philosophical discourse. As by such philosophical credentials no philosopher would ever allow him to enter his academy.

William Arkin by the title of his column expresses both moral irritation and surprise at the U.S reaction to the “Turkey Bombs”. But he is blind to the fact that sovereignty as an absolute legal norm has been throughout our modern period an absolute illusion. In the Age of Terror, it has been transformed into an illusionary fiction. No nation led by prudent political leaders can allow terrorists who attack it to find a safe haven, support, and replenishment of their armaments across its borders.

The U.S. applaud is consistent and in conformity with an unbroken strategic rule. Once one identifies an indefatigable irreconcilable deadly foe that threatens one’s national interests, one has to pursue and destroy this enemy wherever he happens to be. And for contemporary American strategists in the Pentagon it might have a greater strategic meaning. As the incursion into Iraq by Turkey might be a most welcomed dress rehearsal by the U.S. and a warning to its enemy Iran, that it might be fully staged on Iran’s soil by an American ‘impresario’.

The utopia builders, a la McMahon, have set up their boutiques in the global market to sell their shoddy product. After the collapse of the historically misplaced Communist utopia, with its Gulag Archipelagos and Killing Fields, the Left’s sorcerers apprentices are now concocting their new mantric utopia of “global governance”, to take the place of the displaced one. Two fundamental contradictions haunt your argument, and ultimately bury the phantoms of the ne-cons and of neo-imperialism that you raised in your piece. You state that “in the 1970’s a new global system was emerging”. Your phantoms however, the neo-cons, were only in power in 2000. By this time the system was already robust and on its course. The neo-cons were not fabricating a new version of it, as you claim, but were merely its new “managers”. And in the aftermath of 9/11, they were also trying to protect it. That was the reason why they went to war, not oil.

The second fundamental flaw in your argument is, that while you claim that “human experiences are too diverse to bend to the logic of one homogeneous society… Or one global market”, your panacea for the ills of “global neo-imperialism” is “global-scale governance”. At the same time you concede that such “governance” will have “to bend to the logic of…One global market”. But how will you put in place such governance upon such “diverse” non-homogeneous societies? Didn’t the recent failure of the EU to unite in reference to the amendments of its constitution, which is, moreover, culturally homogeneous, teach you anything?

Your remedy of “global-scale governance”, is intellectually unhinged and cannot be taken seriously. All you accomplish with your piece is to replace the “phantoms” of the neo-cons with your greater phantom of universal governance. By such intellectual credentials, Plato would never allow you to enter his Academy.

The principle of non-intervention, very convenient in itself, and very appropriate to a given circumstance, becomes very little better than an absurdity, when regarded as an absolute and when it is desired to apply it under conditions widely different. This principle is a matter of judgment , when to set it aside, and when to apply it. Charles Maurice Talleyrand

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The United States and its allies must ensure that the revolt of the Libyan people against the autocratic, corrupt, and nepotistic regime of Muammar Gaddafi is not drowned in blood by the latter’s draconian response to it, and is crowned with the establishment of democracy and freedom, thus fulfilling the wishes of the Libyan people. President Obama has the total and unswerving responsibility, as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, to steer and pilot the vessel of democracy with its Libyan passengers, that is presently going through the dangerous straits of autocracy whose shoals are threatening it with wreckage, into the safety of its democratic moorings, by been actively engaged in this libertarian, and, indeed, strategic goal.

In the critical situation that besets Libya to indulge in ‘nuanced’ considerations as to whether or not the U.S. should engage militarily in the country, is to indulge in political and strategical onanism. The tracasserie, the turmoil in Libya requires the immediate application of the bombing of Milosevic against Gaddafi’s militias and mercenaries by U.S. airpower to prevent Gaddafi and his sons from genociding their own people. Any procrastination of action and political and diplomatic quibbling on the part of the Obama administration as a substitute of providing an expeditious and strategically prudent resolution by U.S. military action in favour of the revolt of the Libyan people against the brutal and nepotistic regime of Gaddafi, will be deemed by history as a dereliction of duty by the United States as the pivotal power of rational world order.

Atallah in a post to the Washington Note, on January 20, 2009, displayed his inimitable originality as a political thinker when he claimed that the “cease-fire” in Gaza was Obama’s “first foreign policy success.” On August 17, 2009, from among the ashes of his by now burnt out originality he rises like a phoenix to claim that Hamas is showing the first symptoms of a unique metastasis from a virulent fanatic radical organization to a moderate one. The demiurge of this beatific poetically transcendental transformation from the ugly reality of Hamas as an irreconcilable terrorist organization is Hamas itself. By fighting the extremist pro-Al Qaeda Salafist group of Jund Ansar Allah and killing its leader Abdul Latif Musa, on August 14, 2009, Hamas is blazing a new course of political moderation that according to Atallah would be foolish for the US under Obama not to take advantage of that could change the whole configuration of the Palestine Israel conflict.

Thus the offspring of the Islamist fanatical coupling of Ahmed Yassin and Sayyid Qutb, the founder and the spiritual leader of Hamas respectively who both have their roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, like a poisonous snake is shedding its skin and metamorphosing itself into an amiable friendly python.

Atallah is either unaware of the historical fact or deliberately hides it so he can make his case, that throughout history all widespread and toxic fanatical movements had variable degrees of fanaticism among their members and often created within the general movement their own groups that fought each other to the death. The virulence of fanatical Islam in our times and the internecine and fratricidal warfare that goes and will go within it illustrates in a pellucid manner the above historic fact.

In this context, the attempt of Atallah to transform Hamas into a moderate organization that President Obama could deal with diplomatically and persuade its leadership to stop permanently its deadly attacks on Israel and accept the two-state solution by recognizing Israel, is a mockery of serious thinking.